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Game Designer

Jonathan (J. L. Vance) Williams

Scare Crow

Level Designer

Scare Crow is a stealth-based tower-defense game where you play as a Crow named Casey attempting to keep squirrels from invading your backyard and stealing all of your birdseeds by pranking them.

Scare Crow performed incredibly well at the USC Games Expo. press this link to check out our Steam page!

My Responsibilities included:

  • Designed two unique backyard levels decorated with traps

  • Balanced waves of enemies for each level

  • Conducted exploratory research on backyards and gardens to build concepts for our levels

Intro Sequence of the first level

Level Design Main Goals

  • Create two concise levels players can maneuver around easily

  • create sections in the map that all have different strategies to being used effectively

  • Create waves of enemies that help tutorialize the player and give them new ideas for different strategies

Our main goal was to provide players with the opportunity to use different strategies to complete each wave while having each section of the map have a different attack plan associated with it. Although the journey was hard we were able to accomplished just that

First wide shot viewing the Level 1 map

Workflow

2D Level Mockups

My first goal with these mockups was to define a shape language we wanted both levels to be centralized around. After some feedback we decided to go with our first shape and this taught us a few lessons:

  • We want players to get a good view of the entire map from any vantage point

  • We want there to be a central piece to the level players will recognize no matter which level they are in

  • Each section of the map needs to feel and look vastly different from all other sections in the ma​p

With this knowledge I got to building the first real iterations of our maps for both level one and two and our tech designer was able to go in and place paths for squirrels for us to start playtesting.

Image 1: First map 2D concept
Image 2: Second map 2D concept

Early Setbacks and Changes

From many early playtests players thought it took too mcuh time to travel across the map. We determined this was not just due to Casey's speed but due to the size of the map and the distance between sections. This lead us to make a few changes:

  • Casey's flying speed will be increased so players have an insentive to fly around more often

  • Each section will be cut down in size and we will bring each section in the map closer together

These changes, though small, greatly helped players with being able to reach each part of the map efficiently and helped us tie squirrel paths between sections together

ScareCrowCaseyFlying-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter.gif

Casey flying around the map during the setup phase

ScareCrowStoryIntro2-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter.gif
ScareCrowFinalMapDisplay-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter.gif

Adapting from late playtest data

As the months passed, we ran into major issues concerning the map and its sections as follows: 

  • Squirrel paths are not intuitive with the map layout

  • The map is still too large making every section feel disconected 

  • The maze area is too tall and blocks a lot of visibility for players

  • Squirrel paths are uninteresting and straight forward

This feedback forced us to reevaluate our principles for each section and each squirrel path. So we locked down what we wanted everything to be established off of and developed a plan to build out each section effectively. These are the key changes we made in our philosophies:

  • Each section will be built to around a certain playstyle to tackle each path that runs through the area

  • Birdfeeders will be determined based off of where on the map do they have the most potential for interesting paths

  • Each path must cross into another area easily and efficiently or must be long enough to incorporate a majority of its environment

Top: Opening Sequence of Level 2
Bottom First wide shot of wave 1 in Level 2

The Results

After our final changes we saw a massive shift in our playtests. Players responded much better to our map changes and were still challenged by the difficulty of the game while still feeling like the game was fair and mistakes or losses were warranted. These changes heavily pushed towards seeing success when we unveiled our game at USC Games Expo 2025 receiving many good reviews of the overall gameplay and layout of the game.

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